Chrysta wrote:
<< if you visit the paeds floor and look at the pt board and then at ages and
 dx, do you wonder about how they are or were fed and then make a connection?
 do the other nurses or physicians ponder these things?
 could we ask, look in the chart and talk about it?
 ie someone tells you they were just diagnosed with MS, or high blood
 pressure, or diabetes or some auto-immune disease etc.  after other
 appropriate conversation, could you throw out the "do you know if you were
 breastfed" question? >>

I would venture that most people on this list are always looking for, and
noticing,  those connections. They should be there, since research indicates
there will be population differences of many kinds between artificially and
normal, physiologic (breast)fed people. Whether the other staff or other people in
general make them is probably very individual, and in most cases those
connections might not be made. I watched a very good friend who knew what I do, and
what I know, struggle for years with her daughter whom she chose not to
breastfeed, struggle with constant painful constipation, screaming sessions, chronic
ear infections, all-winter antibiotics, and after years of the meds, a child
who eats practically nothing but small amounts of junk food. This child is VERY
bright, personable, and mature, and now at age 11, appears fine, just thin and
"particular" about her food. There has never been any connection made about
the horrors she endured, or the challenge of being a mother to such an unhappy
and unhealthy baby/young child and how she was fed. This mother's view was
that all this was "normal" for her baby, and no health professional ever said
anything. (We talked long about the fact that she wanted to breastfeed this baby,
before the birth, after the baby was born and she informed me she had decided
not to, I never said anything. (Sometimes I wonder about that decision,
however years later, she thanked me for never saying anything...) If doctors or
nurses, especially her, had said to her early on, perhaps a little breastfeeding
or breastmilk would alleviate some of these problems, would you try,  and she
saw that they did, who knows what would have happened differently. When
parents are asked how their children are fed, specifically, it indicates that
feeding method has important and perhaps very visible consequences. Asking with
respect, and because the answer does mean something important, can only help, if
not that child, or even adult, then perhaps a subsequent one.
Judy LeVan Fram, Brooklyn, USA

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